Glossary · Rewards
Merchant category code
Also known as MCC
A merchant category code (MCC) is the four-digit code that classifies what a merchant sells — and on crypto cards it often decides which spending earns cashback and which is excluded.
A merchant category code is a four-digit number the card network assigns to every merchant to label what it sells — groceries, airlines, ATMs, gambling. You never see it, but it travels with each transaction, and it’s the lever crypto cards use to decide what counts.
Why it matters: when a card says “no cashback on cash advances, gambling, or crypto purchases,” it’s the MCC doing the sorting. A wrong MCC can also reclassify a normal purchase as a fee-bearing “cash advance.” So the headline cashback rate quietly depends on where you shop, not just how much you spend.
For example: ether.fi Cash lists the exact codes it won’t pay rewards on — MCC 6011 (ATMs), 6012 (loans), 6211 (brokers and crypto), 6513 (rent), 6532 (account funding), and 7995 (gambling). And Coinbase learned the cost of a bad code the hard way: in 2018 a change to MCC 6051 made card purchases register as cash advances, triggering surprise fees and duplicate charges on Coinbase cards before Visa and Worldpay refunded the duplicate charges.